What's going on with Elon Musk?
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It's relatively unfashionable to say this right now, but I feel like I remember a time where most people felt differently about Elon Musk than they do today. Like the same way there was a version of Donald Trump who was a ridiculous celebrity real estate guy who could have a cameo in Home Alone 2 without anyone really batting an eye, there was a version of Elon Musk that preceded this one. A couple versions actually.

There was the Elon Musk who made it big in the first dot-com boom, before helping to start PayPal. Just three years ago, I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor. This is from a news clip of 28-year-old Elon. He looks very young, wearing a brown blazer that's a couple sizes too big. He's just made $22 million selling his first internet company. I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal beef den. I'm much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.

This version of Elon, I don't think many people had strong feelings about. This is 1999, before we even really used phrases like tech bro. Next came the Elon who was pioneering electric cars at Tesla and trying to build a rocket that could get us to Mars. Elon, thank you so much for being with us here at Wired Science. Well, thank you for having me.

This video is from 2007, almost a decade after that last one. Elon still looks pretty young, but now he's wearing a gray suit that actually almost fits him. The name of your rocket ship is called the Falcon Explorer, is that it? Well, the Falcon 9. The Falcon 9? Yeah, it's the rocket. And then the spaceship is Dragon. Dragon. Yeah, so the Falcon 9 rocket lifts the Dragon spaceship, and this Dragon spaceship is what goes to the space station and then returns to Earth.

Watching this Elon Musk, it makes sense to me why I've met so many young kids, especially boys, who idolize this version of him. He used to come across like a real-life version of Tony Stark, of Iron Man. But today, things feel different. We have a new version of Elon Musk, a terminally online maniac. A man with the most personally expensive Twitter habit of anyone on Earth, who seems to spend a lot of his time just posting recycled right-wing memes and jokes about pronouns.

This Elon is in some circles so intensely disliked that it can bother people if you even suggest that there was a different Elon at any point. But for me, even just as a person who has followed Elon Musk on Twitter over the years, I cannot help but wonder, what is going on with Elon Musk? Obviously, we reached out to Elon Musk for this story. At Twitter, the press line now auto-responds to press requests with an emoji of a poop, which I find funny, honestly. But that's the response we got.

So Elon will not be answering this question for us. Generally speaking, I'm not in the business of speculation or conjecture. I really do not enjoy journalism that makes guesses about other people's interior lives. And yet, Elon Musk is so powerful and has done so much to blast his ego and id all over the internet, I felt like surely there have to be some theories for what's going on here. I wanted to know, among other tech journalists, what are the top three theories about what

If anything is going on with Elon Musk right now. And whenever I have a question about things that are happening online, there's this podcast about the internet I really like to listen to. It's these two guys, they're friends, they're kind of goofy. They basically live online and tell stories about life there. You may have actually heard of it. It's called Hard Fork. And I called one of the hosts. Hi, PJ, how are you? Casey Newton. Hi, Casey. I'm good, except the internet here is not great and there's an ice cream truck.

This fucking ice cream truck is like, can you hear it? Yeah. I've never had an interview delayed by an ice cream truck before. That's a new one. I was with some friends at the beach in New York. Casey was at home in San Francisco. It was supposed to be a couple weeks of vacation for him, but the first two weeks of July had been a little bit too interesting on the internet.

On July 5th, Elon Musk's competitor Mark Zuckerberg had launched Threads, his Twitter clone, which had in five days amassed 100 million signups, the fastest app launch in world history. On July 6th, Musk's Twitter threatened Zuckerberg's meta with legal action, only two weeks after Elon challenged Mark to a UFC-style cage match fight. Like I said, it's been an interesting couple weeks.

Normally, Casey would be documenting all these shenanigans in his newsletter, Platformer, but instead, he'd booked off those weeks ahead of time as some much-needed vacation. I mean, the funniest thing about being off these past two weeks is, like, they've been horrible weeks to be on. Like, I could, I, like, my columns would have been writing themselves all week, and they would have been making me money. Like, it's like, it's bad. Yeah.

but but i also think that it's good to like because people are like sending me notes being like are you gonna like do an emergency newsletter and i'm like good like you if anybody is waiting for you to say something that's a good spot to be in and like let them wait a little bit and then you show up and then they're glad to see you and that's a good spot to be in that's totally true and no one's gonna like take your beat like you're fine you're totally fine and if they try i'll fucking kill them that's the right spirit

Okay, so I've been following your work forever. I followed you when you were a reporter at The Verge. I followed you when you started Platformer. You're the person I like to read because you tend to actually have sources inside of these massive tech companies. For you, like, what is your first memory of Elon Musk? Like, when did he even show up for you as a person at all?

Well, I knew the name from the PayPal days, but in the PayPal era, I was not covering technology. He was just kind of a distant figure in my mind. And then in 2010, I moved to San Francisco. I started writing about Silicon Valley technology.

And at the time, Elon Musk's stock was really high around here. And it was mostly because Tesla and SpaceX were seen as these transformational companies, right? With one of them, he was dramatically accelerating the move toward electric vehicles, a really good thing for climate change and other reasons.

And then with SpaceX, he was getting humanity excited about space travel and potentially colonizing other planets.

And so he had this real kind of sci-fi quality to his work that I think spoke to the inner child of a lot of Silicon Valley workers, right? A lot of them grew up reading about rockets and space colonization. And here you had a guy who was actually doing it. So when I arrived here, that was kind of the view of Elon Musk I had was he was the making sci-fi real guy.

So prior to 2010, the year that Casey arrived in the Valley, Elon Musk is a mostly well-liked, successful tech executive, a person who, crucially, has never used Twitter. June of 2010, he posts for the first time. A completely anodyne tweet. Quote, This is actually me.

It doesn't get a lot of engagement. He's just grabbing the handle because someone had been impersonating him and presumably could have said a bunch of provocative or incendiary stuff. Imagine what that could have done to his reputation. So he ignores Twitter for a full year. And I really feel like I'm telling you the history of someone trying a drug they'll get addicted to. But he ignores Twitter for a year. And then at the end of 2011, he posts again. For some reason, in December of that year, he starts posting a lot and very much in the style of a boomer dad.

December 1st, Elon posts about an ice skating rink in Van Nuys. He posts a picture because he thinks it's funny that it's called Iceland. A couple days later, he shares a Voltaire anecdote he likes. Later that same day, he recommends a Ben Franklin biography. On December 21st, he reports that he got a long phone call from Kanye West.

That finally gets some engagement. People retweet him. December 22nd, high off that, he posts what I think is an old Halloween photo of himself dressed up as Art Garfunkel. No one cares. December 23rd, Kanye comes by the SpaceX factory and they post a picture together, which of course does numbers. Elon spends Christmas apparently in Haiti doing humanitarian work, which he tells people about on December 26th on Twitter. They mostly ignore him.

By New Year's Eve of 2011, it seems to me, as an observer but also just as a person who's had the experience himself, that Elon Musk may be experiencing the early stages of a Twitter addiction. The experience on social media of speaking to an audience larger than just the people you know, it's like walking out on your balcony and then just loudly saying something. It's awkward as you wait then to see if a crowd will gather to laugh or applaud, but the first time it does happen for you, if it does happen,

is a transcendent high, better than many drugs. 2011, when Elon Musk may have first learned to love that balcony high, that was also the last year of his life where he was not a billionaire. And a time when, while he may have been well-known in some circles, even well-regarded, he was not yet anywhere near being one of the internet's main characters.

So Tesla, Elon, like this era, you were covering social media. He becomes like a character on social media. Like, do you remember where this begins for you? I want to say 2014.

13, 14 or so is probably when I followed him on Twitter. And at the time, he was just kind of a fun character to have on the timeline. He tweeted a lot about tech. He tweeted a lot about rockets. And it was just kind of fun to observe from a distance the kinds of things he was doing at Tesla and SpaceX in particular. And I think that's

I do not remember him in those days as being a particularly politics-focused personality. But then over the years, you know, there were things where you would say like, okay, there's something strange happening here. In these years of relative normalcy, the years between 2013 and 2018, Elon Musk goes from being a billionaire with a couple billion to a person with a net worth of around $20 billion.

Much of that increase driven by the strength of Tesla stock. 2018 is also when he started to move in the direction of becoming not Twitter's main character, that's still Trump, but closer to it. 2018, he started dating Grimes, who he apparently met on Twitter. And July of that year is also the moment where, in Casey's memory, he becomes distinctly aware of some new or newly revealed dimension of Elon Musk's personality.

For me, what sticks out is the pedo guy scandal. Do you remember this? Oh, right. So there was a soccer team that got stuck in an underwater cave while they were exploring.

And they had a limited amount of oxygen. The fate of a dozen youth soccer players and their coach in Thailand has captivated people around the world. The boys, aged 11 to 16, have been stuck underground by floodwaters for 11 days. The message from the rescue teams is clear. They're not giving up yet in the search for these boys and their coach. And, you know, due to the bizarre nature of our world, this became...

Like one of the top stories of the day, obviously, was very captivating. Everyone wanted to make sure that these kids could be rescued safely. But then it's in the nature of the internet to say, like, well, how can we fix this problem? You know, let's all get our heads together. And we'll solve this by tweeting at each other because that's how we solve things in this country now.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has a method to save the Thai youth soccer team trapped in a cave. It involves a kid-sized submarine. And so Elon is like, hey guys, what I'm going to do is I'm going to build a special submersible and this is actually going to be the perfect way to rescue these kids.

Musk, the head of SpaceX, Tesla, and the tunnel-digging boring company, shared details of the plan on Twitter. And he said the tube is light enough to be carried by two divers and small enough to get in through narrow gaps in the cave. A prototype submersible. What could go wrong? At the time, though, it felt like an adventure, destined to become one more episode in the Elon Musk Iron Man comic book. But then, on CNN...

A reporter happened to ask one of the actual cave dive rescuers, a British fellow, what he thought of Elon and his mini submersible. What your thoughts on Elon Musk's idea was? In a sticky submarine where it hurts, you just have absolutely no chance of working. This British cave diver, who again had risked his life to actually rescue the children, goes on to call Elon's mini sub a, quote, PR stunt.

And in response, Elon does something that seems very un-Iron Man. And then Elon Musk...

like tweeted something to the effect of like okay this guy's in thailand like um it's giving pedophile to me like like he's obviously involved in the sex trade and someone he doesn't exactly say that what he says is pedo guy as in like pedophile guy um but like the gist of what he was saying was um it seems very suspicious that this man who's criticizing me is in thailand and there could probably only be one real explanation for that i mean yes none of it it didn't make any sense

Elon would then triple down on this baseless attack on the rescuer. He hired a private investigator to try to find dirt on him. He told a reporter to go after him. A lot of people found this behavior strange. Some of them had

happen to be owners of Tesla stock. Shares of the electric car company Tesla fell sharply Monday after the company's CEO, Elon Musk, accused an organizer of the Thai cave rescue of being a pedophile. A British diver who played a key role in the rescue effort of that Thai soccer team trapped in a dark cave for weeks is back in the headlines. He's considering legal action against Elon Musk over comments the billionaire made on Twitter. The event illustrates how Elon Musk's personal actions

can affect his company. It was so horrible. And that was the moment where I was like, okay, there's a screw loose. Yes, yes, yes. I forgot. That was absolutely the moment for me too. And that was a moment where I was like, okay, there's a lot I'll never know about Elon Musk. But what I do know is that if he's embarrassed on the internet by someone,

Part of his personality will allow him to accuse a random civilian who's trying to rescue imperiled children of being a pedophile. Like that is one of the lines of code in his brain. That is not a line of code in the brain of anyone. I know this is an unusual person.

And he has a lot of power. Yeah. Which, by the way, is one possibility for all of this. One possibility for what happened to Elon Musk and one thing that can happen to people on the internet is you just like get in a big fight and you decide everybody who's on your side is good no matter what they believe. And then your beliefs get weirder and weirder because you follow that logic until like...

You have opinions about things you never needed to have opinions about. Yeah, well, look, I think there is this real dynamic on Twitter in particular where, you know, most people, you have a handful of followers. For the most part, you tweet things. You get very little response, right? But what if...

Every time you said anything, every time you expressed an opinion, 14,000 people clicked a heart button and retweeted you and replied, amen. Thank you for saying this. Finally, someone is going there. Right. And then just extrapolate out over a decade. That actually is going to have an effect on your brain. And it's probably not going to be great.

Yes, the people who had that experience before this were AM radio hosts and musicians like people who go in front of a big crowd say this is how I feel and everyone's like yes, yes, exactly. And like it was like a very rare position in society and now we've made it like a less rare position in society and I don't know that that was that that's been entirely good for the people who find themselves in that position.

Yeah, there was this saying a few years back that used to circulate online. People would say, never become the person your Twitter followers want you to be. And Elon Musk is a person who did not take that advice. 2018 was a bad year for Elon Musk. It wasn't just the pedo guy incident. That April, he'd made a bad joke about Tesla being bankrupt, which briefly tanked the stock.

In August, he made another bad joke about taking Tesla private, which resulted in an SEC enforcement action against him. The New York Times did a big interview with Elon towards the end of the year, where he told the paper, quote, This past year has been the most difficult and painful year of my career. It was excruciating, end quote. The Tesla Model 3 had been plagued by problems, and according to the Times, Elon had been praying under pressure. His board members were worried he was taking too much Ambien. But then, Elon seemed to calm down.

For the next year after that interview, his tweets are mostly about Tesla and SpaceX. He behaves like a person capable of exercising sober judgment on the internet. After a short break, the relapse. Search Engine is brought to you by Greenlight. A new school year is starting soon. My partner has two young kids, both of whom use Greenlight. And honestly, it's been kind of great.

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You'll never picture your money the same way again. Betterment, the automated investing and savings app that makes your money hustle. Visit betterment.com to get started. Investing involves risk. Performance is not guaranteed. Welcome back to the show. Last week, I read this amazing biography of Elon Musk by the reporter Ashley Vance. I cannot recommend this book more. It covers his early life through Tesla and SpaceX.

It was published in 2015, a few years before Elon Musk would sink deeply into Twitter. Reading it, I thought I couldn't help but imagine some different version of Earth. One where everything is the same, except that Twitter was never invented. On that Earth, a young kid named Elon Musk is born in South Africa. His father is a bully. What happens at home is never spelled out, but what's implied feels pretty dark.

The kids at school are bullies too. According to Elon, they beat him up and throw him bloody down a set of stairs. He has to go to the hospital. On that earth, like on this one, he finds refuge in books and in his own imagination. He tells someone he thinks his brain is different, that it might have the equivalent of a graphics chip. He says that he can imagine the schematics for things like rockets in minute detail. He disappears in his own mind so often he's misdiagnosed as having a hearing problem.

Later, desperate to escape South Africa, he moves to Canada for college. He doesn't have much money, but tuition's cheap because his mom's a Canadian citizen. He moves to the U.S. after. He and his brother start an early internet company, Google Maps before Google Maps. It gets acquired, makes him his first fortune. He plows almost all of that money into another big idea, an internet bank. That company eventually becomes PayPal. Still a dreamer, he plows much of that money into something stranger. He wants to get a rocket to Mars.

He thinks that America has lost the ability to dream, to explore, and he wants to revive that dream. Many newly minted multimillionaires before him have tried to do this. Most have lost a lot of money. Elon stays the course, actually managed to build a privately made rocket ship that takes a payload to the International Space Station and returns. Oh, also, at the same time he's doing all this, he's leading a completely revolutionary electric car company.

Not only do they make electric cars seem cool, they reimagine the car industry itself. No dealerships, these are cars you buy on the internet. Futuristic-seeming machines, almost like driving an iPhone. In this alternate version of Earth, in 2018, a Thai soccer team still gets stuck in an underwater cave. And cable news exists. That moment holds the world's attention for about the same amount of time.

Elon Musk, industrialist, inventor, and attention seeker, probably does give an interview where he suggests he'd love to help. But when he's rebuffed, even if it stings the part of him that desires to be at the center of every story, he has no outlet in which he can impulsively call a heroic diver pedo-guy. And because he can't do that, he can't get the applause the cheap shot will summon. And because he can't do that...

Maybe he sits in his office, and instead of picking a series of increasingly absurd, debasing fights, he just does his job. He dreams up impossible ideas, some of them actually impossible, but many of them quite useful. In this world, Elon Musk makes electric cars and rocket ships. He does not sink a significant amount of his fortune, and seemingly a lot of his attention, into the purchase of Twitter.

a website that, on our Earth, reporter Casey Newton once really liked using and writing about.

So Twitter has been the company that I have loved covering the most ever since I started writing about social networks, because it has always been both so broken and also the most fun website. And covering the story of this thing that's only ever succeeded in spite of itself and yet was still at risk of dying at any moment was just the greatest thrill ride I've been on in this business.

Wait, and can you, because I feel like when you say Twitter is broken, everybody nods their heads immediately. But when you are talking about it specifically in this context, do you mean that relative to its influence, it never was very financially viable? Like, how is it broken in your mind? Well, there's this great Mark Zuckerberg line that Twitter was a clown car that crashed into a gold mine. And...

truer words have never been spoken. At no point during the building of early Twitter did any of the founders have any idea what they were building. They just thought, what if you could put status messages on text messages like we used to on our AOL Instant Messenger? And it somehow became the beating heart of the global conversation.

And most of the features that we use now were just invented by the users of the site. The users invented hashtags. The users invented retweets. The users invented threads. At any point, someone at Twitter could have had an idea. They never did. They never shipped an idea. It was just like, what are the users doing? Can we turn that into a product? So there's just something very beautiful about that to me. And then, you know, trying to turn it into a business...

because they had no real ideas, the business just was always bad. The leadership was always bad. This company just did nothing but trip over its shoelaces for 10 plus years. And yet every day I opened the website and I was like, this is the best website. So there was just, there was something magical about that. There was something magical about it. A website that like an awkward silence or the city of Montreal was somehow actually better because it was broken. Yeah.

But in spring of 2022, things begin to change. By now, Elon Musk has become one of Twitter's most popular accounts. He has tens of millions of followers, on the same leaderboard as Obama and Taylor Swift. He's also now the richest man in the world, with a net worth around $200 billion. And on April 14th of that year, Elon makes an offer to buy Twitter.

So take me to the moment where he fully walks into your neck of the woods. Like, how did that, what was that like for you? I was not thrilled about it. Jack Dorsey, one of the co-founders and former CEO of the company, had been beating this drum for a while saying Twitter cannot be a public company.

Twitter is a precious and essentially holy idea, and to corrupt it by making it a for-profit capitalist enterprise is unthinkable. And Jack said he regretted that he'd ever done it, and it was like the great tragedy of his life was that he had turned Twitter into a company. Now, of course, it wasn't a very good company,

and activist investors that spent the past year trying to chase him off the board and out of his job. The problem was not that Twitter could not be salvaged as a public company. The problem was that Jack Dorsey was a terrible CEO. This was the one idea that Jack Dorsey never entertained, was that he was that, you know, Taylor Swift style. It's like, hi, I'm the problem, it's me. That was Jack Dorsey, okay? So he's like, I got it. Who can I get? And Jack Dorsey has always had the biggest crush on Elon Musk. You know, in the way that... Oh, because...

For all of the reasons that we talked about at the start of this conversation, Elon was this tinkerer who'd been inspired by sci-fi as a kid and who grew up and was making it real. And what did Elon do with all of his free time during the day? He tweeted. And for Jack Dorsey, it was just like the greatest validation because here you have the greatest inventor of the age and he's obsessed with the product that Jack Dorsey co-created.

I see. I see. So when they would have like an all hands meeting at Twitter, sometimes Elon Musk would beam in over video chat and answer questions and, you know, talk about his use of the product. Give us some direct feedback. Critique. What are we doing poorly? We found a video of this online posted in early 2020, a couple of years before Elon's takeover.

Jack Dorsey, on stage with his back turned to his employees, is asking questions of a giant video screen with Elon's face on it. What could we be doing better? And what's your hope for our potential as a service? If you were running Twitter, by the way, do you want to run Twitter? What would you do? I think it would be helpful to differentiate between

I should say we reached out to Jack Dorsey's company Block for comment. We did not hear back.

So Jack and Elon were friendly. And later, Jack reached out to him and said, why don't you take this thing over? And he got more and more interested in it. And, you know, the actual story of how the acquisition played out was quite crazy. At first, Elon was like,

Elon just acquired a stake in Twitter without disclosing it the way that he was supposed to. Then as soon as that was announced, he joined the board. Then basically, as soon as he joined the board, he said, actually, I'm just going to buy the whole company. And then we were off to the races with just absolutely wild ride. And what did you think? Like, what was your theory for what he wanted out of the website then? Like, why did you think it was happening? Yeah.

Well, at that time, he had started talking more about Twitter's role in society as a bastion of free speech. And Elon had adopted this right-wing position that social networks were censoring too much speech and that free speech was essential to a functioning democracy. And he was going to rescue Twitter from what he saw as...

the encroachment of woke ideology or whatever. The context for this is that after the 2016 election, Twitter and other social networks got a lot of flack for the way that Russians use them to interfere in our election, for their failure to police hate speech, misinformation, and other harms.

And so Twitter had invested a lot in hiring content moderators, developing new policies. When President Trump said something insane and wrong about COVID-19, they would put a label on it. When he said something wrong about the election or mail-in ballots, they would put a label on it. And Elon Musk said, we got to get rid of all of this stuff. And he was pretty explicit about that. And just, you know, given my own position on those subjects, when he started talking about that in the context of taking over Twitter, I thought this is not going to be good.

You could tell that what he wanted was to basically, he's like a guy, he's like a guy watching like football on Sunday, who's like, I'm going to buy the league so I can be the ref. And you knew what he wanted out of that. And so you're like, this is this is not going to be fun for for me, Casey, a person who doesn't want my Twitter to just be like,

people screaming about like wokeism and how the vaccines are giving them like 5g or whatever. Right. Because like you talked to the media and Twitter user and that's not what their complaint was. I mean, obviously we do have endless debates over like what's the appropriate amount of content moderation to bring to any website, but Twitter users had a long list of, I think other things they would have rather seen addressed first. And Elon just wasn't interested in any of that. Like for him, it was a culture war fight from day one.

Elon Musk formally took over the site in October of 2022 and immediately started to dismantle it. Under Elon, celebrities and journalists and brands lost the verification badges that made it hard to impersonate them. Many fled the site. Under Elon, users could pay $8 to get their tweets seen by more people. Predictably, the people you'd least want to hear from were now the most heard from. And as the site's moderation policies bent to favor more inflammatory speech, advertisers fled.

Twitter became an abandoned playground, where it seemed like the only people left were the bullies. An outcome pretty much everyone said they foresaw. Except, well, I knew of one chronically open-minded tech journalist foolish enough to have entertained the idea that maybe Elon did have some kind of secret plan here. Me.

The way my brain works is that if everyone's saying something, I cannot help but be like, oh, maybe not. And sometimes that's an incredibly valuable skill. And sometimes it makes me look very dumb. Because I was like, I don't know, Elon Musk, I don't agree with him politically, but he has successfully run a bunch of companies. Twitter is not a very well-run company. The idea that he could make the site...

have moderation policies I don't like, but run better. I was like, maybe, maybe. I mean, maybe. And then watching him just like pile drive it into the ground. Like,

There's so many times where people are like, I could do a better job than that person. You're like, no, you couldn't. I could have done a better job than that. Like I could have been a McKinsey consultant at Twitter and save them like a lot of money. And I didn't expect it to go that badly that fast. I really didn't. No, look, I, to some degree, I was with you. Like, you know, in all of these cases, I try to,

some degree of humility. I've been wrong on a million things covering tech. I was open to the idea that Elon Musk would come in. I did think that he would have to both keep a good number of Twitter employees who were already there, who knew what they were doing, and bring in people who had some expertise in running social networks. I thought essentially, if he brings in the right generals and lieutenants, something could happen. I was open to that possibility. And then from

From the first week, it just became clear he had no intention of doing any of that. And that's when I gave up on the project. When he fired everybody who worked there who knew what they were doing? Yeah. And then the verification mess that you described was like, oh, he truly has no idea what he is doing. Because...

I mean, no one at Twitter at the time thought it was a good idea. I mean, it was a true sort of like dictatorship situation where, you know, the military warlord just takes over and announces the worst idea and everyone in the entire...

is like, don't. And he's like, we're gonna. And then it blows up massively in the exact ways that everyone told him it was going to blow up. And he was like, ah, waka waka, you know. It's also hard because there are mistakes that you can't really undo. Like you can't, you make the website a place people don't want to be. It's weird. It's like, it's spoiled in a way that feels weird.

I would never have imagined. I just never would have imagined. Yeah. Irene, so as we're recording this week, here's a thing that happened on Twitter. So Twitter has had a really rough month. Every month has been a rough month since he took over. But some highlights from this month, limiting everyone to viewing 600 tweets a day as an alleged effort to fight bots, preventing people who are logged out from even seeing tweets.

And this has created a lot of problems for his new CEO who comes from the advertising world and whose job it is to boost advertising on this site that is falling apart. And Elon Musk decides to tweet, hey, here's a really cool interview that Tucker Carlson just did of Andrew Tate. I'm sorry. I have to play you a clip from this interview that Elon Musk was tweeting about. What do you think of women? I think women are some of the most powerful people on the planet, firstly. A lot of the conversations we're having

Most people don't understand that women are the gatekeepers and women are the ultimate judges. Women are the ultimate judges, especially of sexual access, right? That's Andrew Tate, the Manosphere influencer who's currently facing charges of sex trafficking in Romania. True, then you also understand that women are more susceptible to programming to a degree. I got called misogynistic by saying that if you sit 100 men and 100 women down in front of propaganda, I believe that women are more likely to believe a lot of that. I think a lot of liberals are female. They're more emotional.

And it's easier to convince them of something if you use an emotionally led argument. This goes on for a brisk two and a half hours. And you just look at that and you're like, who is this for? I'm not sure that it's actually for any advertisers. No. And I'm pretty sure it's not for, you know, normal people who want to have a good time on a website. When we come back, we go to our actual question.

What are the top three theories for how Elon Musk went from a guy who might get us to Mars to a person who seems to be spending an extraordinary amount of time on the Internet's worst message board?

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So the whole reason I wanted to talk to Casey is because he spends a lot of time talking both with other tech journalists and with people who work at Twitter, or used to work at Twitter. And I wanted to know, for people with more proximity to Musk, what are the stories they were telling themselves that explained all of this? One thing to say before we get into those theories, one explanation some people will float if you start this conversation with them, is just that Elon Musk has Asperger's syndrome. He has said as much in a Saturday Night Live monologue

But I don't know how to respectfully determine how much of a stranger's behavior is due to a complicated form of neurodivergence that expresses itself very differently in different people. I just know that saying, oh, it's Asperger's syndrome doesn't really answer any of my questions. A lot of people are diagnosed with Asperger's, but we really only have one Elon Musk.

And his behavior, both his antisocial behavior and his pro-social behavior, feels extraordinary to me in a way that a label that short just doesn't capture. Okay, so, delicate paragraph aside, let's get into some theories. Theory number one is just money. Money can make people behave strangely.

So one, I think there is this theory that he got too rich and too disconnected from average people and stopped being able to make the sort of fine grained decisions and distinctions that had enabled his success.

Like if you were to plot on an axis, it's like Elon Musk's wealth and like that line goes up and to the right. And then you draw a graph of like Elon Musk's effectiveness as a leader and that goes down and to the right. You know, it just sort of seems self-evident to me. Yeah, it's also – it's sort of interesting to consider Elon Musk. Like we don't have a lot of people who have become that wealthy that fast anymore.

to be able to say like, this is what it does to a person. And those people, like those people are hard to understand by virtue of the position they're in. Yeah. If you are the CEO of a public company, as Elon Musk is, you are typically extremely careful in what you say, because yeah, being a,

a little bit edgy, like on the margins of some relatively safe questions can have a benefit to you. But the risk is higher than the reward in a lot of cases, right? Like if you're a true edgelord online and you're the CEO of a public company, you risk alienating your employee base and driving away talent. You risk alienating your customers. You risk pissing off your investors and your shareholders. So there's this whole dimension of things which explains why most CEOs are not edgelords.

Which is what leads me to believe that it's actually money that is the bigger factor in this equation because the more money you have, the less consequences there are for anything. And so it sort of removes this natural limit on how much of an edgelord you would be. Because look, I have all sorts of fucking edgy thoughts I never say online. I wouldn't even say them to you privately at a party because I'm like, I don't want that out there, okay? Yeah.

But what if I had $100 billion? All of a sudden, you think I give a fuck what PJ knows about what I said about a party? Come at me, bro. And that's the story of Elon Musk. As you're explaining why most CEOs choose to be boring, I'm like, right. Like, I forgot. I forgot that CEOs before Elon Musk were supposed to be boring. Because after him, a lot of them started, like Jeff Bezos is trying to be more interesting. Mark Zuckerberg feels more comfortable being more interesting. Like,

CEOs used to be boring and there were social and economic reasons for that. It's true that Bezos and Zuckerberg both have gotten a little more interesting in recent years. Let's think about how they got more interesting. Jeff Bezos got a girlfriend. Mark Zuckerberg got a hobby. Those are actually normal things for CEOs to do, right? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Like Elon Musk was like, I'm going to war with the guy that's trying to save the children in the cave. Yeah, you're right. You're right. On the scale of CEOs becoming quote unquote more interesting. It's like he totally breaks the graph. Like it's a totally, totally different thing. Yeah, I think you're right. So that's theory number one. Basically too much money made too fast made Elon Musk tilt.

That theory is less interesting to me than theory number two, but theory number two is also a bit more nerve-wracking to talk about on a podcast. Because theory number two is ketamine. Ketamine is a drug that was developed as an anesthetic in the 1960s. It was used on people in surgery. Later, it was used on animals in surgery. And after that, in the 1980s, it started to become popular as a recreational street drug.

It's a very strange drug. It has some hallucinogenic properties. It can make users feel like they're in an absurd dream. It can also be addictive. Anyway, June 27th, 2023, the Wall Street Journal publishes this article. It's a large story about CEOs in Silicon Valley taking all kinds of drugs. And the article starts with four words. Elon Musk takes ketamine.

It goes on to say later in the piece, quote, the CEO has told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it. End quote. Musk, after the article is published, of course, tweets that, quote, zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much. From what I've seen with friends, ketamine taken occasionally is a better option. End quote.

Casey Newton was wary of talking about Elon Musk's drug use because he has not personally reported on it. But we did talk about the journal's reporting. I think adults who want to take recreational drugs can. People should do what they want to do. But what I noticed is that the journal said that he was taking ketamine, micro doses of ketamine to treat his depression and regular doses of ketamine at parties.

Like if you're taking a drug therapeutically and recreationally, it's worth asking yourself if that's a good idea. And like ketamine is an interesting drug because it's a drug that like it's disassociative, which makes the world feel absurd and not real. And I just like, I'll never know. But I really wonder. I really wonder about the effect of that on that person.

So maybe let me say a couple of things and say that these are not about Elon Musk. These are just the general observations I would make about people. I think people who talk openly about ketamine use and particularly heavy ketamine use have probably used other drugs. And I would say they probably use other drugs consistently.

And I think if I were talking to somebody like that, when they were in some sort of leadership position and the quality of their leadership had deteriorated over time, I would be asking questions about what the long-term effects of drug use had been on that person. And if I were a shareholder in a company run by such a person, I might have some serious questions. So again, I'm not saying that that's specifically about Elon Musk, but I'm saying that if somebody were in the Wall Street Journal talking about their heavy ketamine use

Those are some of the additional questions that I would be asking. It's also interesting about the weird moment we've gotten to where we accept much weirder behaviors from much more interesting CEOs. That kind of like,

came and went. We just all proceeded because we've all gotten used to a world that's absurdity levels are so high, we can't feel anything. Yeah. I mean, also, it's just like the public conversation on drugs is changing so fast. I am a child of the 80s. I'm a child of dare. When I was nine, I was told the worst thing you could do in your life was to smoke marijuana. And now we live in a world where you can get ketamine on Instagram. So I'm actually struggling to catch up to this new reality. So that's theory number two, ketamine.

Just to say, I did get to talk to one source who speaks to Elon and sees him in person. They don't believe drugs are affecting his leadership, and they said that from their perspective, Elon's as focused and as high-performing as he's ever been. That while Twitter is a mess, his other companies do seem to be doing fine.

Is there a third theory for what might be going on with Elon Musk? Yeah, the third theory would be that he believes that we're living in a simulation and so that truly nothing matters. Obviously, this is my favorite theory, the simulation theory.

Please tell me more about the third theory. So in 2016, Musk attends the Code Conference and is being interviewed by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. And at the end, Josh Topolsky, my old boss at The Verge, stands up and asks a question, which is, did he think that our existence was simulated? There's a...

Sort of a philosophic concept that a sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to create a simulation. Yeah. Maybe you've answered this before? A simulation. I've had so many simulation discussions, it's crazy. Okay.

And Musk says, quote, I've had so many simulation discussions. It's crazy. And Josh says, you've thought about this? And Musk says, a lot. It got to the point where every conversation was the AI simulation conversation. And my brother and I agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub. And I think that's because they spend a lot of time... I think they spend a lot of time together in hot tubs. Ha ha ha!

And so then Musk says, if you assume any rate of improvement at all, then games will become indistinguishable from reality. Even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now, let's just imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale. And in that case, Musk says that the odds that we are living our lives in what simulation theory people call base reality, you know, which is like the real, real. Musk says that the odds there are one in 10,

billions there's a one in billions chance that this is base reality oh okay what do you think well i think it's one in billions so musk in 2016 basically says that there is only a one in a billion chance that we are not living in a simulation right now that's more alarming than anything else to me yeah well now peter here's what i have to tell you i've spent a lot of time thinking about the simulation theory this year and i have to say i find it

scarily persuasive, but I don't know how much we want to go there. No, really? No. Here's the thing. No. So one of the things that the AI researchers started doing this year, now that we have these generative AI systems came out, is that they started to try to simulate societies. So there was like a really fun paper. We talked about it on my podcast, Hard Fork, where they kind of set up a town and they just have these characters interact with each other. And they gave them kind of a few starting characteristics of

And then they just observed what would happen. You know, they sort of wrote some code and saw the characters would talk to each other. And then one of them decided to run for mayor. And pretty soon you were like, we're creating a text-based SimCity just based on these large language models. Okay. And so why is that interesting? Well, we assume, I think, that those simulations are only going to get better over time.

And that if 100, 1,000 years go by and we see, as Elon Musk says, some rate of improvement in these simulations, then we should have simulations potentially that are just as persuasive as how real life feels to us. So the first question is just, do you accept that

One, we're already running simulations here in what we think is base reality. And two, that those simulations are going to get better. I believe both those things. So then it's just actually a very short jump from there to, well, what makes you so sure that the base reality that you think you live in, where we're already simulating societies, is just like the only one? And I think that's just like a hard way to think your way out of. So-

It doesn't bother me that you're finding the simulation theory more persuasive. Like, that's fine. How should I feel about the idea that someone who wields an enormous amount of power and influence might think that nothing's really happening and he's in a computer program?

Totally. And I would just say, I'm simulation theory curious. I'm not saying I've gone all in. I'm just saying that some of the assumptions that Musk makes in the quotes that I read, I think are okay assumptions to make. But why is it scary? Well...

I have been told by someone who speaks to CEOs about these matters that there are a number of CEOs in Silicon Valley who believe fully in the simulation theory hypothesis. And they believe that one reason why you might simulate the world is to...

Oh my god.

And if you already are suffering from megalomania, you might actually assume that you are the reason that reality is being simulated. That like you're the reason why somebody booted up a computer to load like, you know, Earth 46 and see what would happen if these variables collided. Oh my God. Oh God. So it's like a mix of nothing matters, but also you're very important. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

So those are three theories floating around among people whose job it is to try to understand Elon Musk. Again, we outlined these theories in an email to Twitter's press office and got their auto-response, a poop emoji. This podcast search engine asks questions, and you have to be honest about the questions you have but might never be able to answer with total certainty. We try to be careful here in speculating about someone else by being clear about what we do know and what we don't or can't know for sure.

Ultimately, other people are a mystery. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is a mystery I find more interesting than some other mysteries. We'll probably have more questions about him this year. This week, though, I did have one more question for Casey while I had him on the line. Right now, as we're speaking, Meta, which was once Facebook, has launched Threads, which like,

Is working better than I think most people expected. They've had over 100 million signups. It looks like we might be heading into a world where we have like a bunch of different Twitter clones that all kind of coexist forever. Like it looks like we might be entering into a world where Twitter is no longer like the dominant like public square, the Jack Dorsey wanted it to be. Like, what do you think happens next? Like, what do you see down the road?

I think Twitter is legitimately dying. I think the company will be in bankruptcy proceedings within 12 months. I think the news media will essentially complete its divorce from the website. And I think it will be left to the Tucker Carlson's and Andrew Tate's and Elon Musk's of the world. So I truly believe that that app has entered a death spiral.

I also think that the need that Twitter served for so long to have these public conversations between average people and high profile people of various capacities still exists. There is still a need to be served.

And so we're entering this kind of Cambrian explosion of these apps like we haven't seen since the early days of Twitter. You know, in the early days of Twitter, there were also Twitter clones. Some people might remember Plurk. Some people might remember Pounce. Almost nobody does, but they existed and they were just Twitter. Okay, it was just Twitter and they flopped because Twitter won. I think something else is going to take its place. Something else is going to become the default. And the fact that

And do you want something to replace Twitter?

Absolutely. Look, and not for any high-minded reasons, PJ. It's part of my business. Like, what I do is I write things, and then I need a place where I can go and tell people that I wrote things. And specifically, I need to talk to people who do not pay me money that I wrote something, okay? And then some of those people will see that, and they will think, I'm going to give that man $10.

That is a huge part of my life. So I don't care if Mark Zuckerberg makes it. Okay. I don't care if Jack Dorsey starts. Whoever starts something and it works, that's where you can find me with my little lemonade stand asking you for $10. Casey Newton. You can support his wonderful, wonderful lemonade stand, which this year was definitely the place to understand Twitter's meltdown at platformer.news.

And you should subscribe to his fantastic podcast, Hard Fork. It's a funny, insightful look at our changing internet. I really enjoy it. Also, look for him on Plurk. I don't even know if he has an account there, but I'm just curious. After the break, a recommendation from Search Engine. Quickly before we go, I got a lot of great emails after our episode last week about finding new music once you're old and irrelevant. Surprisingly concrete suggestions from listeners were...

Just to share them with you, a lot of people recommended WFMU, the radio station, and specifically the show Wake and Bake with Clay Pigeon, weekday mornings. Like a lot of people emailed about this show. I haven't listened yet. I'm going to check it out. If you listen and you like it, let me know. Other recommendations that I thought were interesting, Soma FM apparently is very good. There's a website called everynoise.com that like maps the music you like generically on a scatterplot and shows other things like it.

And then finally, our editor, Shruthi Pinamaneni, apropos of last week's episode and this week, wanted to recommend a grime song, Venus Fly, features Janelle Monae. It's really good. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me and Shruthi Pinamaneni and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. They also fact-checked this week's episode.

Theme and sound design by Armin Bizarrian. Show art by Ali Moss. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Richard Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Klauser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf.

Those questions are my favorite thing to see on my phone.

Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.